The Practical Evils of Dissent, by a Clergyman

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE POLITICS OF DISSENT, AND THE UNCHRISTIAN STRIFE OF MERE PARTY WARFARE. This is a fruitful theme for remark, and in its abundance might serve to describe the whole system of Independent and Baptist dissent in our days. Of the Methodists I must ever speak and think in a different manner than of any other body of dissenters. As yet, they are the half-way house between the church and dissent. But how long this will continue none can tell. Only let primitive Wesleyanism, as it is impudently called, obtain the mastery, and an open warfare will soon be proclaimed by Methodism against the endowed and state-supported Church ? Politics and the chapel are synonymous terms. In the times of that soul-reviving non-conformist piety, presented to us in the lives of Baxter, Howe, and Henry, politics were left to the world, and to the church if she pleased. A political Parson was then a favourite theme of reproach; but what shall we say now, when nine dissentingchapels out of ten possess a political teacher ? The Romish principle, of the end sanctifying the means, has been often abjured as an infamous and dishonourable thing, and yet this is precisely the argument adopted by these Christian men to defend their violation of all ministerial propriety and principle. When these persons denounce the existence of institutions whose downfall, we conscientiously believe, would involve the partial destruction of Protestantism in our land, and bring on a bloody civil war, and years of revolutionary atrocity, ?it is too much to expect, that Church ministers of the gospel are to remain passive spectators of the conflict. But who, at the time of an election, are found to involve themselves in all the dust, heat, and lowest turmoil of the contest, more entirely than many dissenters ?...